Assuming that we are all not machines in 2050:
In the year 2050 Leon paid full amount and clicked the circular lock into his head and tapped okay for five minutes of diagnostic ability. The left lower leg had been paining him for weeks since he’d slipped and with normal thinking he was at a loss for the reason.
An idea rose out of a sloppy yet congealing mash, the synthetic knowledge load working, a sudden memory out of the master database taking form: claudication, stress fracture, thrombosis, mastication of the nerves (a new idea, introduced into the literature 2035). He spent what might have been two minutes marveling at the structure of the brain (although he felt it no relation to his current condition, but who wouldn’t be amazed at what was known of the brain?) Then the five minute mark, and just as the lights went out, this thought came: sarcoma.
“Sarcoma, sarcoma, sarcoma,” he pitched to his neighbor from the balcony. She stretched her neck out a window and shouted, “Then you’re a goddamned dead person, Leon.”
“What were the others?” he asked. “Something about Claudia or stress.”
His neighbor said, “Consult the weekly sermon. And next time write it down.”
On the black market, high prices for soccer skills: an hour of synthetic Pele, a few thousand Euros. The fine print on the screen was writ: buyer beware . . . some infusions may not perform as desired.
As Jerry found, soon after assigning a paycheck’s worth of coin to the machine and filling his brain with a stab of Ronaldinho. He raced to the field, the crew stretching and footing handovers. Jerry joined them with Bush’s Grin and Clinton’s Twinkle. Pat raced around him, even though Jerry knew exactly what to do, visualized it, understood the hook, felt the freedom of it in the corner of his mind. Pat twittered. Jerry affected and fell.
“Dude, you need to lose about a hundred pounds,” Pat said.
Jerry felt the center of gravity jazz heavily to the right, to the left: wobble body, muscle toss, Jupiter overspinning. He could feel the excess weight snatch thickly at his bones and sling his legs toward the left bounds. He felt like a spit wad; he smelled like a barrel of crushed salamanders. At the field center, he fell again. Pat said later: “Man, it sounded like the pop of shattered ice.”
“I have five thousand Euros worth of flight training,” Lenox said, steading the nuclear chopper.
“You were never much of a mathematician,” his girl friend said. “You bought enough infusion for thirty minutes. Do you see the water beneath us? And San Francisco is an hour away.”
“Oh,” Lenox said, “but I only had enough for thirty.”
“You stupid ass, you stupid ass. The scales, the scales. The software comes with time ratios and warnings and preventions, you stupid motherfucker.”
An old man smiled at a counter in a small town, doesn’t matter where. “I want to feel young again,” he said, hoarsely. “Twenty, even forty. You know, just to hear the world again with the ears of the young.”
The young shop keeper had his chin in palm, his elbow on the counter. He said, with a small breath of requital, “It feels wonderful. It feels like a million. Just like a million.”
